The Yen family is everything a movie should be. One of the highest values of watching a movie (or any art) is for it to surprise you in some way. When you are surprised by the quality or novelty of a film, when you see or feel things you normally wouldn't wouldn't see in your daily life and that gives you a new experience.
A film also should have didactic value. It teaches you something or makes you understand your own life even more deeply.
Third is the emotional aspect. A film should make you feel something. Fear or disgust for horror; joy or humour for comedies; sadness or pity for tragedies; calm and satisfaction for dramas.
In that context, the Yen family is everything a movie should be. It's about a family where the patriarch has lead the whole family on a quest to make as much money as possible through what can best be described as side jobs: he directs his family to operate a catering business, a smutty call line, a delivery service, etc. Through joyful frenetic activity this family does something that typical people would find disgusting and wrong in a self-reflective capitalistic society. Being too obsessed with money, as Dickens teaches, is wrong. And this duly leads to overt displays of contempt or frustration from their neighbours and family members.
It is a bizarre situation, almost an exaggeration and critique of the capitalist rat race. Novel, and surprising, to say the least.
But that's on paper. How about in practice? In putting people to work, the family gives meaning, for example, to the lives of the elderly who enjoy being of service and making a little extra money. In fact, the senile mother-in-law seems to have new life and stability breathed in her when they put her to work despite the brother-in-laws protests. The patriarch of the family is kind to all and plays with his chyldren and everyone seems very happy - not the Dickensian old bitter miser. The important thing was not the money, then, but the value that having a direction and goals and work give people - the didactic component of film.
And of the pathos? It's a comedy, and certainly hilarious. Whether it's the uncle sending the 10-year-old nephew Nietzsche and the Bible to counsel against the evils of money, or the outrageous smutty call line they're running or the simple way the characters turn every annoying, or tragic life circumstance into an exciting opportunity to squeeze more money out of life or the subtly threatening way a mother preparing food approaches her son when he asks if his father is really his father, it's hilarious.
And yet it also manages to be sad. The 10-year-old son doesn't agree with the rest of his family's money-grubbing ways. He's too young to know what's happening, but he knows it's wrong and knows it frustrates him. Can two such different personalities coexist in the same family?
It's got some weaknesses in the form of silly little chases that go on too long and perhaps some endings and resolutions to problems don't make that much sense. At 2 hours, it would have benefitted from cutting some things. However, it's a complete movie and one of the greatest movies of all time.
